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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The more common and recent hate I hear is that so much has been layered on top of it that it's difficult to manage or really understand what's happening in the code. Mentioned in other comments, but things like loads of annotations, Spring abstractions, and so on.

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Recently coming from a Python/Flask codebase to a Java/Spring codebase, I would say that the amount of "magic" is not all that different.

It's just that with Spring, I can go to an extremely well-written user manual, or to StackOverflow and get my questions answered. With the Python/Flask codebase, I had to splunk my way through all the layers of random libraries the original developers slapped together, in an attempt to reproduce something resembling out-of-the-box Spring.

I suspect that those original developers had fun making all of those custom choices back in the beginning. I don't know for sure though, since of course they've all left the company since then. The company chose to migrate because it wasn't maintainable once that tribal knowledge left.

That sounds more like a microframework vs a kitchen sink opinionated framework issue though than a language issue. eg Flask is a DIY collection of libraries with your own architecture vs say Rails or Django where you have 95% of those decisions made for you and baked in.

I'm sure there are Flask style frameworks in Java land too. And there was a port of Spring for Python a while back too :)

Exactly this.

Had to stand-up a server in Java recently.

At some point I realized I was doing more programming via XML files and Spring decorators than via actual Java code. Mostly because Java itself isn't a great abstraction for a CRUD server.

If you did it recently, you should not have needed XML. Even a decade ago, XML-based configuration was on its way out. The transition from Spring to Spring Boot enabled us to use regular code to configure our injectors, for example.

I haven't touched XML for nearly a decade as a full-time Java developer.

I've only ever developed Java at places that had their own infrastructure for everything, so this question may sound uninformed, but isn't Maven still the de-facto package manager used for most Java applications and isn't Maven configured with XML?

Yes Maven uses XML.

Yes it's using XML for all the wrong reasons - as a config and even scripting format (hello ant plugin) when XML is for markup/text. Fscking Maven doesn't even allow basic XML/SGML features such as entities/text macros. And yes Maven's pom.xml is used for package metadata on maven-central and elsewhere even if you don't use Maven directly.

BUT I have to say, every project using gradle as alternative so far has receded into bizarre ad-hoc deployment scripting. Maybe that's just because gradle can do stuff that was hidden away in jenkins build files, but still ...

Well, while maven be a bit bigger, gradle has plenty of users as well, which uses groovy or kotlin for configuration.

Most of the pieces we were using allowed for configuration via XML or code.

Predictably, the team therefore used both.

XML is pretty rare in Java code written this side of 2010. Not that it doesn't exist, but the whole spring mess is not something you really have to touch to set something up in Java.

I usually enjoy Spark[1] for bootstrapping a simple REST-like interface. There are other options, but in general, you don't really need glue-languages at all if you stray away from old-fashioned EE-style frameworks.

[1] https://sparkjava.com/

Has those people have any understanding of what is their computer? It is layers upon layers of abstractions, plenty in hardware and even more in software. In fact, the only tool we have to actually solve complex problems is (good) abstractions. So those haters should probably find better arguments.

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